I just returned from NIME05 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference) in Vancouver, Canada. I thought I'd write a little summary since Pd is a key part of this conference.
I had the pleasure of meeting a number of people who worked on things related to Pd: - Thor Magnusson and his ixi GUI for Pd and SuperCollider - Scot Gresham-Lancaster performed using Pd - Bill Verplank controlled a Pd patch with his custom haptic controller - the brothers David and Iván Rodríguez of RBL-soft demoed their 3D environment for controlling samples with a glove interface, built using Pd and Gem - Jennifer Carlile and Björn Hartmann demoed OROBORO, their collaborative haptic controller using Pd as its synth - Jesse Fox and Jennifer Carlile demoed SoniMime, an instrument programmed in Pd which uses two 3D accelerometers to control sound - Mark Havyliv wrote a Pd-to-J2ME compiler "Pocket Gamelan" so you can make musical mobile phone apps using Pd - and I presented the [hid] toolkit set of objects
I also met Ivan Franco, who is a regular on this list and runs Pd workshops in Portugal.
Check this site for more info, all of the papers for 2005 will be posted there eventually, the previous years are already freely available:
I've got to say that this conference has been inspiring because it has done a good job of bridging the gap between the academic world and the rest of us. There are many people who participated who are professional musicians, instrument builders, and others so it actually feels like a meeting ground to discuss new possibilities for music.
ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) is coming up in September. While many interesting people and ideas are represented there, it seems to be very much closed off from all but an insular community of academics. I can't even get access to the papers from 1999 to the present at any library in NYC and their website has little info. Its being hosted at Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, where Guenter Geiger is. They seem to be making a push to break it out of its shell with such things as one page "Inspirational Ideas" papers, an organized "Off-ICMC" event, a theme of "free sound", and more.
What I would love to see is a conference where people out doing computer music on their own, like many (if not most) of the people on this list, can meet up with the separate worlds of commercial and academic computer music. Then we'd have a truly amazing conference.
.hc
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"[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity." -John Gilmore